Our sister publication SlashGear has got all hands on with the sweet and much anticipated Nokia N900 and its Maemo operating system. While not as much fun as a full review, first impressions on the device are offered.

Initial excitement has been tempered by the realities of trying to meld a smartphone with an Internet tablet. The browser was working during the hands on action and SlashGear reports pages load quickly, but embedded video took a while to load.

The keyboard is more compact that other internet tablets like the N810, and the buttons had nice feel but typing longer messages was slow going. That’s about it for the first impression and we can expect a full review sometime in October.